Shekveti, a little Black sea resort of Georgia, hosted the 6th International Summer School for artists of Russian speaking theatres from the countries of the former Soviet Union. This year young artists from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine came to Shekveti for a 10 days intensive. For the second year in a row they were joined by 12 students from Harvard’s Slavic languages and literature department.
The classes on acting art, stage movement and stage speech were lead by GITIS teachers: Vera Kamyshnikova, Larisa Kaidalova, Aydar Zakirov, Rustam Minnibaev, Anna Trifonova. Vocal and speech classes are critically important to improve pronunciation skills for actors of Russian speeking theatres living outside of the country. The trainings were very useful for Harvard students too. As a result they presented a poetry program — recital of verses by Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam.
Aside from every day practices that started at 7:30 am daily, the participants had a lot of interesting guests. Theatre artistic directors and managers as well as theorists and arts specialists from all the countries mentioned above came to School with lectures. The night program is worth mentioning too — every night was a national cuisine time with tips how too cook Georgian kebab or Ukranian borsht.
“What’s going on here is just incredible”, GITIS principal Grigory Zaslavsky said while visiting Shekveti.
